Katie Skelly is a fun, interesting cartoonist whose work hasn’t quite connected with me. I knew that from her My Pretty Vampire , but the “fun, interesting” thing got me to come back for another run. The Agency is a 2018 book, collecting a loose series of webcomics that came out over the three previous…
The Flash arrived on the CW as an antidote to the heavy, bleak world of Arrow. Our Scarlet Speedster was going to be a bright, upbeat superhero series and it wasâat first. With each successive season, it grew bleaker and more chaotic as an overstuffed cast all demanded screentime and the writing staff never seemed…
I went through a Bendis kick, around the time a lot of the hip comics kids did, back in the mid-Aughts. I at first liked Powers, and then thought it ran at high speed away from everything that was originally good about it. I was mostly impressed by Alias. And I think I wandered away…
Some books have things that are easy to write about; some don’t. The more naturalistic a book is, the harder I find it to dig into – the more it’s just people living their lives, and the point of the book is seeing them, feeling some comparison to your own life, and making larger connections…
J. Michael Straczynski is back with a new installment in his imaginative Babylon 5 series. The difference this time is that itâs a 76-minute animated feature film, released this week from Warner Home Entertainment. B5 launched into syndicated television sixteen years ago, featuring a somewhat darker, more nuanced approach to the future. It was filled…
I am not a gearhead, so I have always looked at the Fast and the Furious franchise from a distance. But their popularity makes them hard to avoid. Fast X, the tenth installment in the series, arrives on disc and streaming this week from Universal Home Entertainment and no doubt entertains those who have been…
What’s important here, I think, is that it’s a delayed sequel. One that came a decade later, after other stories. Everything else flows out from there: this is not the next thing, but a later thing. Pop Gun War, Vol. 2: Chain Letter was collected in 2017, from material that mostly appeared in ISLAND magazine…
Soldier: From Script to Screen By Danny Stewart 144 pages/BearManor Media/$32 (hardcover) $22 (softcover) Everyone has their passion, whether it is universally acclaimed or not. Thankfully, BearManor Media provides an outlet for their authors to share that unique passion with those who also find the subject matter of interest. Here, Danny Stewart delves into the…
Popeye the Sailor: The 1960s TV Cartoons By Fred M. Grandinetti 230 pages/$30 hardcover $20 softcover/Bear Manor Media Like author Fred M. Grandinetti, I was a child of the 60s and was exposed to all the Popeye cartoons, and it took time for me to understand that some were excellent, some were good, and some…
It’s reductive and not quite true to say that this book is what Julia Wertz wanted Drinking at the Movies to be – but it’s a good enough place to start. Drinking was her first full-length graphic novel after two collections of Fart Party stories; at the time, I thought it was more of a…
I shouldn’t be the one to tell you about this book: I’m the wrong gender, the wrong orientation, the wrong nationality, the wrong generation. So don’t trust me. Blue Is the Warmest Color is a graphic novel by Julie Maroh – that’s what the edition I read says; I see indications that the author goes…
There is a long-running – it may have ended; I don’t know – series of graphic novels about the Louvre museum, officially licensed by that museum. Each one is separate, a different idea from a different creator or team. It started in 2005 with Nicolas De Crecy’s Glacial Period , and I’ve seen a few…
